E-Verify Getting Hit From All Sides

The problem with getting to a comprehensive solution to our mess of immigration laws is showing itself in the US House Judiciary Committee, while it ponders the implications of mandating the use of an electronic screening system called E-Verify. You might wonder what E-Verify is supposed to verify. It is supposed to verify that you have the right to work in this country. 

Elise Foley of The Huffington Post describes the growing internal Republican opposition to the bill here.

You might also wonder, why nearly every member of Congress wouldn't be in favor of a way for employers to go on the internet and verify that all of their employees are legally able to work in the United States. After all, many firms use the internet to make sure the goods and services they purchase are legal? Why wouldn't they want to do the same for their human labor resources. 

An electronic method to check employment status would seem far simpler than collecting suspect and possibly forged documents to verify work status. This was the big reason E-Verify was created, because employers were able to reasonably claim that they should not be held responsible for hiring workers based on documents that "looked" legit.

E-Verify has actually been up for a few years now, but it's use is still not required by all employers. After first being implemented the system was attacked by it's critics for having inaccurate information. How can you hold employers responsible for using a system that can't be trusted? And what if U.S. Citizens are not on the system, wouldn't that put someone eligible to work out of a job?

So unlike the top-secret CIA/FBI list which nobody can see and had the same problems when it was implemented - the airline passenger no-fly list - the E-Verify system is not required to be used. Thankfully, it is required to be used by government agencies and government contractors - a good testbed to work out all the kinks, I suppose.

House Judiciary Committee member Dan Lungren (R-CA) is worried that the E-Verify mandate would hurt agriculture businesses and drive workers underground. He has reason to be worried. Because agriculture work involves long hours of back-breaking, hard, outside labor, few Americans apply and 80% of these workers are undocumented.

What if we actually believed the vast herd of politicians (mostly Republicans) who say they want to "get control of our borders." It is obvious that a chief deterrent to undocumented workers is to make sure every worker is documented.

Let's dream a moment that....(poof!) all workers are either verified or fired.

What if we actually required these businesses to hire actual legal workers and pay them an actual legal wage? Our price of food may go up, depending on how much of the produce is destined for foreign markets.

But our chicken pluckers, lettuce and a strawberry pickers, and other human harvesters, cleaners and domestics, would actually make a decent wage with protection from the abuses commonly found in industries with unregulated workforces - long hours, suffer-able conditions, and regular toxic chemical exposures.

More importantly, we could expect higher demand for to labor ripple across the economy as the undocumented (and now un-hireable) job poachers go back home of their own volition. We won't need to arrest or transport anybody. We have already seen a huge drop off in migration as the economy stayed in the tank these last few years. Passage of the E-Verify mandate, along with continued actions against employers who hire illegal immigrants will "stem the tide" that will become a virtual trickle.

Then we will start looking around for people to take care of us in the frailty of our old age, but that is another immigration story.

Congressman Lungren is proposing a temporary worker program to fill the gap he suspects (rightly) will be unmet by US workers. However, this seems to be a non-starter in parts of the country, where they are still trying to figure out what to do with all these people who showed up in their mid-western and southern towns with brown skin, and who don't speak English. Ironically, one thing they did figure out  -- that these people will take cash payments under the table and language isn't such a barrier in these transactions.

I often find myself frustrated at the pronouncements of those who put undocumented workers "outside the law", but will fight tooth and nail to make sure that the laws protecting US workers from these "criminals" should not be imposed and enforced on all US employers.

It will be interesting to watch if Congress is really wants to start to understand what is really costs to "get control of our border" and if agribusiness still gets to veto legislation that would make sure the entire US workforce is legal, properly compensated, and protected from abusing employers as well as job-poaching undocumented workers.

Or maybe they just want to get another campaign ad paid for by agribusiness or the Tea Party Express.